Quotes by Conductors - Page 2

God tells me how he wants the music played - and you get in his way.
Arturo Toscanini
I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.
Pablo Casals
People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite...what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not to indefinite for words, but rather too definite.
Felix Mendelssohn
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
This has been my vocation to make music of what remains.
Itzhak Perlman
Nothing is better than music.... It has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.
Nadia Boulanger
To what do you attribute your advanced age? Well I suppose I must attribute it to the fact that I have not died.
Sir Malcolm Sargent
I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end.
Richard Strauss
When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.
John Powell
Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.
Hector Berlioz
I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.
Igor Stravinsky
Plenty of masterpieces are just one cliché after another, Mozart for example, but that's quite natural, because if you think about it, two clichés that have never met each other before can beget the most original and profound effect.
Thomas Ades
❝Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can; there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.❞
Sarah Caldwell
This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely,more beautifully,more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
In the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it. In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.
Benjamin Zander
I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.
Pablo Casals
I have seen the greatest artists and the most eccentric divas in music. The greater and more visionary they were, the more self-reflexive and childlike they behaved.
Christian Gansch
Ask many of us who are disabled what we would like in life and you would be surprised how few would say 'Not to be disabled.' We accept our limitations.
Itzhak Perlman
Always remember your days are blessed. You may know how to profit from them or you may not, but they are blessed.
Nadia Boulanger
What do we teach our children? . . . We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique . . . You may become a Shakespeare a Michelangelo a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.
Pablo Casals
Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.
Franz Liszt
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve.
Igor Stravinsky
To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people, and not love things and use people.
John Powell
Achieving your goal is greatExceeding your goal is exceptionalExceeding your goal and teaching others is Leadership
Joseph Swenson
Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, orperhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn't know. But I amsure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.
Aaron Copland
(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was...
Pierre Boulez
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin Britten
It was not sympathy in the ordinary sense which he [Adolf Hitler] felt for the disinherited. That would not have been sufficient. He not only suffered with them, he lived for them and devoted all his thoughts to the salvation of those people from distress and poverty... his noble and grandiose work, which was intended 'for everybody'...
August Kubizek
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another…and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.”—
Leonard Bernstein
I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite — matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possibilities. And such matter presents itself to me together with limitations. I must in turn impose mine upon it. So here we are, whether we like it or not, in the realm of necessity. And yet which of us has ever heard talk of art as other than a realm of freedom? This sort of heresy is uniformly widespread because it is imagined that art is outside the bounds of ordinary activity. Well, in art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible. My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
Igor Stravinsky
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
Music is the heart of life." She speaks love; "without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.
Franz Liszt
I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.
Max Reger
Hitherto I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter, or perhaps an architect. Now this was no longer the case. Now he aspired to something higher, which I could not yet fully grasp. It rather surprised me, as I thought that the vocation of the artist was for him the highest, most desirable goal. But now he was talking of a mandate which, one day, he would receive from the people, to lead them out of servitude to the heights of freedom.It was an unknown youth who spoke to me in that strange hour. He spoke of a special mission which one day would be entrusted to him, and I, his only listener, could hardly understand what he meant. Many years had to pass before I realized the significance of this enraptured hour for my friend.
August Kubizek
Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
He was a six and a half foot scowl.(on Rachmaninov)
Igor Stravinsky
One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.
Igor Stravinsky
The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
...the player who looks least engaged may be the most committed member of the group. A cynic, after all, is a passionate person who does not want to be disappointed again.
Benjamin Zander
Music is either good or it isn’t, it’s not someone’s opinion.
Toscanini
I believe in the understanding of difficult situations, difficult music, or any kind of difficulties, through familiarity. Familiarity, in this case, does not breed contempt, but breeds understanding.
Daniel Barenboim
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
Leonard Bernstein
...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.
Hector Berlioz
In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness... I see what people call God in all these things.
Pablo Casals
Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..
Pablo Casals
Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
Igor Stravinsky
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
Leonard Bernstein
Life is denied by lack of attention whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
Nadia Boulanger
Homeopathy is the safest and more reliable approach to ailments and has withstood the assaults of established medical practice for over 100 years
Yehudi Menuhin
How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.
Benjamin Zander
Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
John Philip Sousa
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'.
Aaron Copland
The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one.
Hector Berlioz
Always remember rule #6... don't take yourself so damn seriously
Ben and Rosamund Zander
Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
Leonard Bernstein
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its students."]
Hector Berlioz
Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
Pablo Casals
Our musicians in residence carry this belief into the classroom. They don't think of children's self-esteem as so fragile that it will be shattered by the suggestion that the child guessed wrong or jumped to an invalid conclusion. They make corrections matter-of-factly, with no feeling that a chid is a failure because she has made an error, but with ocnfidence that the feedback will help the child learn and be accurate the next time.
Peter Perret
Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. And this is the question: who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining? We can do that with our children, too. Who am I being, that my children's eyes are not shining? That's a totally different world.
Benjamin Zander
Dancing is the body made poetic.
Ernst Bacon